When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be. What, pray, is a few hours–a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered.

Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money.

Sister carrie pages